Grafana Alloy — OpenTelemetry Collector Distribution by Grafana

What it is

Grafana Alloy is an open-source, vendor-neutral telemetry collector from Grafana Labs. It unifies metrics, logs, traces, and profiles into a single agent, serving as the replacement for the older Grafana Agent.

Alloy targets platform engineers and SREs who need a single binary to scrape Prometheus metrics, collect logs for Loki, forward traces to Tempo, and ship profiles to Pyroscope -- all with a programmable pipeline language.

How it saves time or tokens

Instead of deploying separate agents for each telemetry signal (Prometheus exporter, Fluentd, Jaeger agent), Alloy consolidates them into one binary with one config syntax. This reduces the number of running processes, config files, and deployment manifests a team must maintain.

How to use

1. Install Alloy via package manager or Docker:

# Linux (apt)
sudo apt update && sudo apt install alloy
# Docker
docker run -v ./config.alloy:/etc/alloy/config.alloy -p 12345:12345 grafana/alloy:latest

1. Write a config file using the Alloy syntax (a HCL-like pipeline language).

1. Start Alloy pointing to your config: alloy run config.alloy.

Example

// config.alloy -- scrape Prometheus metrics and forward to Mimir
prometheus.scrape 'default' {
  targets = [{'__address__' = 'localhost:9090'}]
  forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.mimir.receiver]
}

prometheus.remote_write 'mimir' {
  endpoint {
    url = 'http://mimir:9009/api/v1/push'
  }
}

// Collect logs and send to Loki
loki.source.file 'app_logs' {
  targets    = [{'__path__' = '/var/log/app/*.log'}]
  forward_to = [loki.write.default.receiver]
}

loki.write 'default' {
  endpoint {
    url = 'http://loki:3100/loki/api/v1/push'
  }
}

Related on TokRepo

• DevOps Tools -- More infrastructure and operations tooling
• Monitoring Tools -- Observability and monitoring solutions

Common pitfalls

• Alloy syntax is not YAML. Existing Grafana Agent YAML configs need conversion using alloy convert.
• Running Alloy alongside an existing Prometheus instance on the same host can cause port conflicts on 9090.
• Memory usage scales with the number of active scrape targets and log tails. Set resource limits in Docker or Kubernetes to avoid OOM.